mckell, I have an extremely strong attachment to my therapist and I am comfortable using the word love about what I feel toward him. But yet I have not "pretended or related to her[him] as if she someone other than a therapist." I love him for who he is and what he has meant to me and done for me. He's great! I don't think you need to pretend your therapist is someone else in order to feel love towards him.

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I think maybe I just don't have the capacity to feel things that other people do.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">mckell, it could just be the client-therapist dyad you are in, not that you don't have the capacity. Love doesn't have to be part of it in order for you to make progress and benefit from therapy. With my first therapist, I definitely did not love her, but I respected much of what she said and found that when I followed her advice, sometimes I made progress and things got better. Therapy with her was definitely worth it, not a waste of money, and I'm glad I did it. When I moved on to my current T, I experienced something different with him (love, closeness, attachment, call it transference?) that I had not with the first. We have made great progress and I have experienced so much healing with him. But I don't think this means the experience with the first therapist, with whom I didn't experience this closeness, was not beneficial. There are just different sorts of therapeutic experiences. It sounds like you get a lot out of yours, and that's great!